speaks English like a Frenchwoman – that accent which is the very sound of perfidy and glamour to honest English ears. ‘I thank you for your welcome, Lady Shrewsbury.’
‘Please come in,’ I say, hiding my smile at her pronunciation of Shrewsbury, which is really ridiculously affected. She sounds like an infant learning to talk with her ‘Chowsbewwy’. I gesture towards her lodgings. An anxious glance from my husband asks me if the place is habitable and I give him a little nod. He can trust me. I am a partner in this venture, as I am a partner in this marriage. I shall not fail him, nor he me.
There is a fire in her great hall and she goes towards it and sits herself in the big wooden chair that is drawn close to the blaze for her comfort. Since the wind is in the east the chimney will not blow back a buffet of wood-smoke, please God, and she must admire the table before her, which is spread with a fine Turkey carpet and my best gold abbey candlesticks. The tapestries on the walls are of the very best, woven by nuns, thank God for them, and in her bedroom she will find the bed curtains are of cloth of gold and the coverlet of the richest red velvet which once graced the bed of a most senior churchman.
Everywhere is bright and warm, lit by the great square wax candles that are hers by right of being a queen, and in the sconces against the stone walls there are torches burning. She puts back the hood of her cape and I see her for the first time.
I gasp. I can’t help myself. Truly, I gasp at the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. She has a face like a painting, as an artist might draw. She has the face of an angel. She has thick black hair, cropped like a boy’s, but sparkling at the front now with melting snow. She has dark arched eyebrows and eyelashes so long they sweep her cheeks. Her eyes are dark, dark and clear, and her skin is like porcelain, white and smooth without a single flaw. Her face is perfect like the carving of an angel, a serene heartless face; but what makes her remarkable, unlike anyone I have ever seen before, is her charm. She turns a smile on me and suddenly she is luminous, like a shaft of sunlight, like a sparkle on water, she is like some beautiful thing that makes your heart lift for the mere joy of it. Like the swoop of a swallow in flight which makes you feel glad to be alive. Her smile is like that, is my first foolish thought, her smile is like the swoop of a swallow in flight in midsummer dusk. My second thought is that Queen Elizabeth will hate her like poison.
‘This is a most kind welcome,’ she says in French, then sees my frown as I can’t understand her and she says in hesitant English: ‘You are kind, thank you.’ She holds out her hands to the blaze and then she stands up. Quietly, her lady-in-waiting comes forward and unties the furs at her neck and slips off her wet cloak. She nods her thanks. ‘Lady Shrewsbury, may I present my ladies-in-waiting? This is Lady Mary Seton, and here is Lady Agnes Livingstone,’ she says, and the women and I curtsey to each other and I nod to one of my servants to take the wet cloak away.
‘May I offer you some refreshment?’ I say. I left Derbyshire when I was a girl and I have studied my speech ever since; but even so my voice seems too loud, uncouth in the room. Damn it, I have lived in the greatest houses of the land. I have served Queen Elizabeth and I count Robert Dudley and William Cecil as my personal friends, but I could bite my tongue when I hear the words come out of my mouth clotted with the Derbyshire burr. I flush with embarrassment. ‘Would you like a glass of wine or a mulled ale against the cold?’ I ask, taking extra care with my speech and sounding now stilted and false.
‘Now, what do you like?’ She turns to me as if she is truly interested in my tastes.
‘I’d have a glass of mulled ale,’ I say. ‘I brought it from my brew-house at Chatsworth.’
She smiles. Her teeth are small and sharp, like a kitten’s. ‘Parfait! Let’s have that then!’ she says, as if this is to be a delightful treat. ‘Your husband, his lordship, has told me you are a great manager of your houses. I am sure that you have everything that is the very best.’
I nod to the groom of the servery and know that he will bring everything. I smile at George, who has thrown off his own travelling cloak and is standing at the fireside. We both of us will stand until she invites us to sit, and seeing George, an earl in his own house, standing like a lad before his master, I realise for the first time that we have not allowed a guest into our house but rather that we have joined the court of a queen, and that from now on everything will have to be done as she wishes, and not how I prefer.
1569, Winter, Tutbury Castle: Mary
‘And what d’you think of my lady Bess?’ Mary Seton asks me, speaking French for greater discretion, a hint of malice in her voice. ‘Is she as you expected? Worse?’
Now they are gone and we are alone in these pitiful little rooms I can lean back in my chair and let the pain and exhaustion seep through my body. The ache in my side is especially bad tonight. Mary kneels at my feet and unties the laces on my boots and gently pulls them off my cold feet.
‘Oh, I heard so much about what a woman of sense she is and what a grand manager of business that I was expecting a Florentine banker at the very least,’ I say, turning the criticism.
‘She won’t be like Lady Scrope at Bolton Castle,’ Mary warns me. She puts my boots to dry at the fireside and sits back on her heels. ‘I don’t think she has any sympathy for you and your cause. Lady Scrope was a good friend.’
I shrug. ‘Her ladyship thought I was the heroine of a fairytale,’ I say irritably. She was one of those who sees me as a queen of ballads. A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore. But I am above these judgements, I am a queen. ‘I expect no sympathy from her ladyship,’ I say bitterly. ‘She is my cousin the queen’s most trusted servant, as is the earl. Otherwise we would not be housed by them. I am sure she is hopelessly prejudiced against me.’
‘A staunch Protestant,’ Mary warns me.‘Brought up in the Brandon family, companion to Lady Jane Grey, I am told. And her former husband made his fortune from the ruin of the monasteries. They say that every bench in her house is a pew.’
I say nothing; but the small incline of my head tells her to go on.
‘That husband served Thomas Cromwell in the Court of Augmentations,’ she continues softly. ‘And made a fortune.’
‘There would be a great profit in the destruction of the religious houses and the shrines,’ I say thoughtfully. ‘But I thought it was the king who took the profit.’
‘They say that Bess’s husband took his fee for the work, and then some more,’ she whispers. ‘He took bribes from the monks to spare their houses, or to undervalue them. That he took a fee for winking when treasure was smuggled out. But then he went back later and threw them out anyway, and took all the treasure they thought they had saved.’
‘A hard man,’ I observe.
‘She was his sole heir,’ she tells me. ‘She had him change his will so that he disinherited his own brother. He did not even leave money to his children by her. When he died he left every penny of his ill-gained wealth to her, in her name alone, and set her up as a lady. It was from his springboard that she could vault to marry her next husband, and she did the same with him: took everything he owned, disinherited his own kin. At his death he left it all to her. That is how she got enough wealth to be a countess: by